Reverse engineering necessarily requires looking at parts and aspects of the thing to be reverse engineered. The matters that were considered are included below.
A step lock is a series of ascending water locks (like the locks on the Panama canal) in which the water level in a lower step lock is raised to the level of the next upper lock, and transfer of a watercraft or other floating body may be made through a gate between the lower and upper locks. Long sequences of step locks can be made. Step locks are conventionally supplied with water from the upstream (uphill) end.
A fifth-century BCE historian named Herodotus recorded a non-enabling description of a machine, made of “short timbers”, that was used to lift large (e.g. 2.5 tons) stones to various levels in the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt. A myriad of proposed machines and methods have since been proposed to meet the long-felt need for such a machine, but none have won wide acceptance. Such machines are known as “Herodotus machines”. The Herodotus machine is an ancient technology and has been lost for over twenty-five centuries. There has been a long-felt (2,500+ years) and unmet need for an Herodotus machine. This paper represents the reverse engineering of that anciently known and subsequently lost technology.
The principle of displacement of water is known. In the simplest illustration, a bather draws a bath tub about half full of water, places a floating rubber ducky on the water, and then gets in the tub. As the bather sits down in the tub, the bather's body displaces an equal volume of water which, being constrained by the tub, moves upward, lifting the rubber ducky. Anything that floats (has positive buoyancy) can be lifted using this principle, including ships and barges.
The Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt, is an ascending passageway enclosed in the Great Pyramid featuring opposed spaced-apart limestone walls and a limestone floor. The passageway is about six feet and nine inches wide, with a centrally aligned channel three feet and five inches wide and two feet deep. Opposed, spaced-apart shoulders extend one foot and eight inches from the top edges of the centrally aligned channel to the walls. The shoulders have twenty-six opposed pairs of regularly spaced aligned sockets adjacent to the walls. The lower walls and floor were charred when investigated by Europeans. The lower walls and floor also feature tic-tac-toe scratches and contain, in the pores of the stone, chemical decomposition products of frankincense.
Raw frankincense is tree sap from trees of the genus Boswellia. Raw frankincense was so valued by the ancient Egyptians that a palette of balls of raw frankincense was an item in a triumphal parade after a successful expedition into Egypt's southern neighbor, as shown on a wall carving in an ancient tomb. Raw frankincense has the necessary temperature stability for use as a flux for gold working. Rosin, used as flux in modern rosin-core solder, was originally a tree-sap derivative.
Caliph Abdullah al-Mamun entered the Great Pyramid around 820 CE, found the Grand Gallery, and had gold removed from the Grand Gallery. It took “one hundred men using one hundred torches one hundred days” to complete the task. The results were so uneconomical that further intrusions were not undertaken.
Gold is, as a consequence of gold's natural properties, the best water tight sealing material known for so-called “room temperature” applications. Gold is still used today as plumbing seals in high-value plumbing installations and in the hatch seals of submarine vehicles. Gold-to-gold seals are particularly effective for watertight seals.
At least as recently as the 1960's, the charred remains of some large wooden gears and an uncharred oddly knotted rope were in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, cataloged as being from the Grand Gallery. Some of the gears did not have continuous perimeters and some did not have teeth around their entire perimeters. An early investigation of the gears concluded that the gears were not strong enough to lift pyramid stones, that the absence of teeth was a result of breakage, and that the incomplete perimeters were also the result of breakage.
Originally thought to be rollers, and found near ancient quarries and construction sites, short wooden logs were examined under a microscope by an archaeologist and it was found that there were no surface indications of use as rollers, but rather showed that the short logs had been lashed at the ends.
Lamp-like ancient Egyptian artifacts having a lamp oil reservoir, a long, nearly vertical, spout ending in a small horizontal tip extending from the oil reservoir have been found. The spout has several pairs of opposed arcuate extensions on the spout, generally on top but angled slightly to one side. The spout also has several small oil lamps along the length of the spout. A bowl, made of one piece with the oil reservoir, extends externally from a side of the oil reservoir. Artifacts of this type are found with a solidified puddle of gold in the bottom of the bowl and a layer of raw frankincense above the gold.
Two large jars found in the Queen's Chamber of the Great Pyramid have weights built into their bases. Scientific analysis by others has shown that the jars were never used to contain anything.
Desoldering braid is a wire wick, used with a soldering flux, to wick molten solder from electronic parts and circuit boards and is available from Radio Shack.
When quarrying Tura limestone, used as casing stones for the Great Pyramid, ancient Egyptians would anoint the stones with oil before pushing the stones off the quarry wall.
Ancient Egyptian artifacts comprising two parallel spaced-apart operationally horizontal beams with connecting structure and one or two operationally vertically extending hubs with radial spokes have been found. There is one published photograph extent that shows such an artifact partially stuck at an angle in a sand dune, with two hub and spoke devices visible and spokes from a third hub extending out of the sand. It has been proposed that such devices were used to hold together boxes for casting Pyramid building stones as concrete. An extant tomb wall painting shows a one hub and spoke device with a stone fuzzily outlined underneath, interpreted to be lifted by workers. No ropes are shown in the tomb painting.
Edward J. Kunkel, a hydraulic engineer, published a book entitled “Pharaoh's Pump”, in which he proposed a step lock system external to the Great Pyramid that was supplied with water at the top of the step lock system. Supplying water at the top, to flow down through the step locks, represented the conventional thinking of his time as well as the present. Kunkel proposed that the water was pumped for the step lock system using the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid as a vacuum pump by burning fuel in the Grand Gallery, sealing the Grand Gallery and, as the air eventually cooled within, using the reduced pressure to suction up water to the top of the step locks. Kunkel relied on the charred surfaces of the lower walls and floor of the Grand Gallery, and charred wooden gears found within the Grand Gallery to support his argument. Kunkel proposed that, at the top of the step locks, the stone cargo would be transferred from the top of a barge to a smaller device for placement in a construction reservoir in the structure. No credible evidence of Kunkel's external step lock system has been found.